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Authorship: A Performance Measure of Intellectual Capital

2003; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/00007632-200301010-00002

1528-1159

James N. Weinstein,

Health and Medical Research Impacts

A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give, in the measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein As mere mortals we do not have the skills of Harry Potter or even the great Houdini. Authorship is an honor and a privilege and though there is something magical about scientific writing its unlikely to find a place in Hollywood or even late night television. More likely than not, as is the case in most publications, citation by others is infrequent and stardom doesn’t exist. Most write scientific papers for the pleasure of being involved in something exciting, i.e., a new treatment, technique, or process that is thought to be better than others and certainly no worse. Others write papers because they simply want to share their scientific work with their peers and defend their ideas and methods. They believe that their work will impact others in the field in a positive way. Some believe their results may actually change practice, and or change our understanding of our daily work, whether clinical or experimental. Intellectual Capital Though the efforts of authors and co-authors are not patentable and rarely bring direct monetary gain, they are generally not expended for strictly altruistic motives. The hoped for academic advancement and associated academic promotion that follows successful publication is often accompanied by increased wages. Since the dollars are usually small, the academic and collegial respect gained are often more important. Thus, the intellectual capital of the investigator(s) and author(s) is significant and quantified similarly to the way a business usually evaluates and values their employees. As academically oriented physicians and scientists, our intellectual capital is our major asset. The value of that asset may be reflected in the market by salary and benefits. Like a professional athlete, most of our value is based on our performance. Authorship is one means of evaluating academic performance based on the assumption that much of that performance is reflective of our intellectual capital. After all, there are incredible skills involved in being an author. Though not as recognized as those of an athlete, they are no less impressive. Publishing frequently or in prestigious journals demonstrates to your company (hospital, laboratory, etc.) that your intellectual capital has relative value. It could be likened to fielding percentage in baseball or field goal percentage in basketball or football. In each case you are judged by your performance. In baseball, your batting average may be the most important statistic, unless of course you are a pitcher, where number of wins may be the key performance measure and ERA (earned run average) a secondary measure. As an academic physician, authorship should be but one measure of performance. As a physician, intellectual capital must incorporate your surgical and/or medical skills as well as your diagnostic and clinical acumen. Your value to your institution and your community is a composite. The number of patients seen and/or number of surgeries performed must not be the sole performance criterion of a clinician, nor should the absolute number of experiments performed by a bench scientist. These easily quantifiable attributes would give one a skewed and under-representative sense of one’s intellectual capital. There is yet another layer of confounding added to the attempt to value intellectual capital. Performing surgery or doing the experiment is, of course, difficult, but doing it correctly and achieving the prescribed goal is more dependent on the preparation than the actual procedure. The years and years of training in the classroom, the laboratory and or the operating theater to obtain the necessary intellectual capital and skills, must not be dismissed. With any great athlete, it is the off the field work and the preparation that makes that athlete great. Of course some are born with extraordinary skills, but their work ethic is what makes them great. For example, there are many great basketball players. Why do we remember Michael Jordan? Because Michael Jordan has all the skills but it is his off the court training and work effort that make him the best. In the corresponding world of science and medicine there are also Michael Jordans, like Einstein or Salk. Authors, not unlike great athletes, are interested in having their work recognized and appreciated by those who hear it or read it in the peer reviewed literature. Authors want recognition at a level commensurate with the quality and public importance of their work. Authors who work hard in the preparation of their scientific question, employ the best scientific methods and perform excellent clinical and basic research have the opportunity to publish their work. In so doing they expose themselves to peer review and open discussions for and against their work. But the decision of who should be the lead author and co-author is not unlike that of who gets to be in the starting lineup. Unlike sports, it is not simply the best guy on the team or even the captain. Authorship is very special and needs to be understood by all. Given what’s at stake in the assignment of authorship (e.g., respect and prestige, promotion, tenure), it is an awesome responsibility. So many people contribute to scientific endeavor, at levels ranging from the administrative to the strictly conceptual, that it can be difficult to discern where the lines of authorship should be drawn. However, there have begun to be clear guidelines about who to include as author and who not to. To me, it is all about intellectual capital. Someone had the idea, did the literature search, wrote the grant, coordinated and orchestrated the project, acquired the funding, analyzed the data, interpreted the data, wrote the paper, reviewed and edited the paper (often multiple times), etc. Now it is done and the weighing of who contributed what must be put down in writing upon submission of the paper. Who is included, who is first and last? Seniorship Does Not Mean Authorship Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean your name should go on every paper. Or just because you’re the best know person at your institution does not mean you deserve authorship (this is known as the Halo Effect). There have been many institutions wherein the most senior person has been a “guest author.” This is neither necessary nor correct. The senior author may be present but if not part of the idea and the writing, editing and/or interpretation they need not be an author. Just reading the paper is not enough. To continue with the athletic and business metaphors, Michael Jordan does not take credit for other team members’ points to make his average better. He does not ask someone else to shoot his free throws and credit those shots to himself. A business person doesn’t usually give credit to others for his/her sales or expect a bonus for work someone else did. Likewise an author can only claim authorship for work they in fact do. Authorship Depends on What You Do, Not Who You Are JAMA deputy editor Drummond Rennie MD, 1 recently modified JAMA’ s Information for Authors to correspond directly to the most recent update of the uniform requirements originally recommended in 1985 and continuously updated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. 2 According to the ICMJE, authorship credit should be based only on: Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and Final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship. Among other journal editors, Rennie was dismayed to find that these guidelines were being ignored, and decided to follow the leads of the editors of The Lancet and BMJ in requiring that authors disclose their specific contributions to the article, and that the journal actually publish them. 1,3 For simplicity, JAMA provides a list of contributions categories for authors to check off before submission. Spine Policy Authorship is all about performance and valuing intellectual capital. Spine agrees with The Lancet, BMJ, and JAMA that authors should be recognized by their specific contributions to the manuscript under review and has added this requirement to the Information to Authors section. Each author’s contribution must be specified in the submission of a new manuscript. This should be present on the title page with each author’s degrees and institutional affiliation followed by their specific contribution to the submitted manuscript (Table 1). Beginning in the spring of 2003 this information will be published in the electronic version of Spine at the end of each article.Table 1: Authorship Contributions ChecklistOrder of Authors Regarding the issue of author order, Spine recommends that the lead author be the person responsible for much of the “work” as defined by collaborators and the investigative team. In many situations there are a priori criteria established for authorship, as well as a designated person(s) or writing group responsible for making important decisions around the issues of authorship. In some cases the Principal Investigator of a large study will act as the arbiter and decision-maker when potential conflicts of authorship, order, and or attribution arise. Spine supports the concept that the senior author of a work should be last but should not be automatically conferred. Senior authors can and should be first authors when their contribution to the work warrants it. Likewise, statisticians should be authors but not simply for running the numbers. They need to be involved in the study design, data acquisition and data interpretation with the writing team. A good statistician can not work in isolation and be brought on the scene to “save” the day by contributing a “P value.” This is not the way to utilize a statistical colleague nor is it a good use of their talents. Like an athletic team, there are positions each player can identify as their primary role, i.e., goalie, wing man, guard, pitcher, quarterback, etc. In a scientific paper for Spine I would like the authors to identify their contribution to the team. Many institutions around the world now use the Scientific Citation Index (SCI) as a means of quantifying ones academic efforts and the significance of their publications. Spine is ranked 2 in Immediacy and 4 in Impact when compared to all other orthopaedic journals in SCI’s Journal Citation Report, 4 and it is the only musculoskeletal journal listed in the evidence-based medicine lists by Sackett. 5,6 To reach this level of excellence requires us to maintain the highest of standards and to have policies that respect the individual authors, reviewers and readers. We are proud of our publication policies at SPINE and hope that we have clarified any doubts about a very complicated and truly important issue of authorship. As Einstein said, “A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give, in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.” To be accountable for one’s work is an expected responsibility imposed upon authors. In order to maintain the quality and integrity of one’s research and the respect of colleagues, institutions and representative societies, one’s authorship bears much of the burden of proof of one’s intellectual capital. At the same time, as an author you are more often than not dependent on the labors of others. Therefore, you must exert yourself in the contribution you make as an author so as to be deserving of the credit that is associated with authorship and the acclaim and or recognition it brings to bear on that intangible but all important intellectual capital.